Honey Bee & Quilt Inspired Fall Mantle Decor /Secret to making Hexagons /Heidi Sonboul DIY Challenge

Hello my crafty tribe! This is Artsy Maddie and this video is going to be part of the Heidi Sombol DIY challenge and I just felt like it needed a tiny bit of a disclaimer. I did get carried away. This is definitely an over-the-top project so just use it as a jumping off point. Just like a few boxes. I'm going to show you how to make these little hexagon boxes and obviously just a few of them would be much more plausible and doable and enjoyable but I got a little carried away. I know I'm over the top. I know my creative mind goes a little berserk. I have to live in it so I'm more aware than anyone how carried away I get but just definitely hopefully it inspires you just as a jumping off point. Be creative and go for it but hopefully you'll enjoy the video and get some ideas. I'll have a link to Heidi's channel in my description box as well as a link to the epic playlist. Hopefully lots of lots of creators participated. So just as a disclaimer and hopefully you guys enjoy the video and get some great ideas. So with that said let's get creative. These are the hexagon boxes. They are made from pallet wood so just some free scrap pallet wood and I wanted to experiment so I went over to my dad's house to get some help and he's the king of get her done so within an hour or two we had all these made and I don't have footage of it but I'll tell you the secret. The secret to these is 30 degree cuts so you make all of them the same size with 30 degree cuts going inwards towards the center and they line up perfectly and they go together so well so easy like it's just scrap wood and they worked like a dream. It was super easy to do especially with my dad's help so thank you dad thanks for your help. So now I've just traced them all out onto some thin hardboard. It is 1 1⁄8 inch hardboard. It's nice and cheap. You get it for about $11 Canadian at the hardware store so much less expensive in the states. Cut them out with my jigsaw, gave them a quick sand on the edges and then for these larger ones I am just spraying them with some Elmer's spray adhesive. A little bit stinky not too bad but it's probably best to do it in a ventilated area. I was just doing it quickly inside but and then you just work fairly quickly. It does have a little bit of open time. I'm just using my roller to put down that was wrapping paper from the Dollar Tree and then this is a sheet of scrapbook paper so you're going to see lots of scrap scrapbook paper in this project so I'm just pulling them from lots that I have on hand. If you don't have scrapbook paper that you want I wouldn't really necessarily go out and buy some but if you have a printer available to you there is so many designs online. It's just endless what you can find for scrapbook paper so if you just kind of do some google image searches I'm sure you'll find colors and patterns that you like. So I'm going to be working in some pastel colors kind of ranging from a pastel yellow to a deeper peach color and then kind of this lighter blush color and because the wood was rough and I didn't have the patience to like sand it down perfectly smooth or plane it or join it or that sort of thing I'm okay with it being rustic and rough and I just kind of worked with that so I'm not doing a perfect paint job I'm just kind of going through and roughly covering them leaving some spots showing through some of that rough wood underneath and I like the look of it. If you don't and if you are working with better wood you'll get better results but for me this is like free and awesome and I like the texture of it so then I am just tacking down those backings to these little frames here so I just used some tacky glue Aleene's tacky glue or wood glue or whatever you have will work and then I'm just wanting these to last me for some time I really like them so I just went through and stapled them with a pneumatic stapler just to keep them all intact and nice and sturdy and then it's great if you have a damp cloth or a baby wipe just to catch any of that excess glue that comes out and then here comes the fun part so now we get to decorate them so I had picked up throughout the summer I actually started this project in the spring with my dad working on these hexagons in the spring so I've kind of been picking away at this through the summer and just picking up flowers that I liked that were in this color family so ranging from the yellow to the coral corally peach kind of range and I'm just going to make like little cascades on one or sometimes two if it's a bigger frame one side or two just depending but just kind of making them all unique so this started to remind me a lot of quilting or scrapbooking like working on books where you just try and make everything look good but unique and so this was my inspiration these little bee boxes from the dollar tree I don't know if you've seen them but I picked up all that I could find so I think I ended up with about a dozen I was only able to find one of the little teeny tiny pack that had two in it the rest all just came individually but I was lucky enough to find a dozen at a few different stores so that made me really happy over the summer and yeah so what I've done is I took a picture of that box and then went into photoshop and just got rid of the color that was inside the wings and tried to put a white outline around it for you guys and then I would just go through and fussy cut them if you don't have as much patience as me with that I tried to leave a little bit of a wider white line around it so that the fussy cutting will be easy and you could kind of have a little white outline around it like a sticker sort of thing so I'll have those available in my google drive for you guys in that public folder that I share with you so just to give it some more definition or just more texture I guess I just went through and did some dry brushing on them so on the yellow I went through with some white dry brushing and then on the blush color I actually went on the dry brushing with the pale yellow color and then on the coral ones you'll see like the peach ones then I just went through with the blush color on it so it's not a true like dry brush rustic technique but more just to give it just some depth to the color and just some more interest to the wood sort of thing and to just kind of maybe like take away from the rusticness of the wood a little bit if you will but yeah I don't know it's a take it or leave it thing if you like it do it if you don't of course you don't need to do that just that little bit extra I'm showing you so I really like these variegated roses I think these started coming out in the spring I remember getting those quite early and so I don't know if you notice the difference but there's some that are paler and then some that have a little bit more of the corally peach colors in them so they were fun to work with especially on this variegated paper here too that I found like kind of the ombre effect I thought that went really well together so here's the blush one so just going over the blush with the white dry brushing so you guys will have to let me know I thought this might really speak to quilters and and scrapbookers because that's kind of what this reminded me of the whole time it felt like I was kind of quilting scrapbooking crafting all together so I'll just try and go through them and show you kind of the different ways that I kept them all unique so these white sunflowers are from Dollar Tree as well and then just gluing in the leaves and stuff just trying to think of like different angles and different ways to kind of present each box and then also if you had a piece of scrapbook paper that you did like but not multiples of it you can also just take a picture of it and print some if you have a printer available to you if you don't have a printer available to you because that was my situation up until the last year here I always went to the library to print stuff so hopefully you guys have that available to you too we were allowed like a certain quantity for free each month and then up like over and above that it was the cheapest printing like I would say about half the price of staples so I'm really hoping that maybe you guys have that available to you too if you need it so here is showing you just the yellow on the blush color and then some places I would go in a little bit heavier with it and then just having like either a damp rag or the baby wipe like I'm using you can kind of do like a smear of it down the wood and it'll kind of almost work like a glaze and just give you that little bit of yellow on top of the blush so then it's fun with these deep boxes you can kind of work onto the sides a little bit so I'll be showing you that here how some of the flowers and some of the bees even went onto the insides of the walls of the hexagon as well so just trying to think three-dimensional and not just not just decorating the back of the box and this yellow polka dot is the wrapping paper from Dollar Tree I love it so much I picked up another roll of it and I just think it's the prettiest most dainty polka dot I just love it and these sunflowers are also the Dollar Tree sunflowers this was the paler yellow they had this in the spring and summer before these deeper tones for fall so I'm kind of thinking of this as my summer display and then it's able to be trans like not transformed but just kind of transitioned I guess into an early fall display as well so I'm really excited about that and I'm excited to have it out again next year as well so these I found two of these welcome signs that were a hexagon shape so I thought that would be fun to kind of have you know another set in there that was a little bit different so I just went through and primed them with my bullseye 123 primer just to seal them and then just mod podging some paper down to these as well so just some scrap of paper that I had on hand and I tried spritzing it with water and I didn't really notice the difference I don't know if this paper was just too thin to notice the difference but still trying to figure out all the little tips and tricks to mod podge so now moving on to the boxes I just wanted to add some interest to them as well so I would just trace out the bottom and then you just have to cut inside the lines a little bit to make it fit better so you're just wanting to cut that little bit smaller just for the depth of the sides of the box and then just because it's paper to paper I just went through with glue sticks was the easiest and then I went on to thegraphicsfairy.com if you haven't been to that website she is wonderful she shares all these vintage prints that no longer have copyright on them so really high quality awesome graphics that you can print out and she had some really pretty sunflowers so I took advantage of that for sure so just showing you like even this is like a different way just putting the the picture of the sunflower inside the box instead of the flowers and then this is just a printed piece of scrapbook paper so just to show you guys that and that's kind of a deeper deeper corally color I didn't seem to have any of that color in my scrapbook pad so I just found one online and printed it out and then these flowers were from the fall collection and these ones I believe were summer and just like a little daintier flower just to show with the smaller boxes just for scale it was a bit of a nicer scale to have some smaller flowers with the smaller boxes and then I thought these flowers were so pretty too I believe those were kind of recent at Michael's on clearance with their summer stuff so I knew on top of the side ones for my mantle I wanted some to sit on top of boxes so I knew that I'd have to glue a few together just to be able to sit on top of the wooden boxes so that's what I'm doing here is just gluing a few so that they're nice and stable to sit on top and then I just have a couple vases from previous projects and some leftover flowers so I thought I would set up a couple of little bud vases and then this was a splurge I spent eight dollars at the thrift store on this picture but I thought it was so pretty and I just picked some of the natural grasses from my yard and stuck them into the container so here you'll get to see how I've had it for summer and just had it all displayed together so for next year I'm excited to break it up a little bit and pull some of the boxes away into smaller vignettes around my house and then I think I'll put a sign like make a sign next year to have in the middle just to kind of break up all the hexagons a little bit I was inspired by some signs that I saw at Michael's this year so just kind of thinking about like an oversized long one it's always hard to hide all the cables and everything for under the tv I asked my husband to raise it up so I could have things across the mantel but then it's always hard to hide those dvd and cables and speakers and all that so then I have transitioned it now into fall so I just put some wild wheat into some of these vases that I recently found at Michael's on clearance and added some pumpkins and some maple leaves I think they're actually they're oak leaves I believe from Dollar Tree and just some little Dollar Tree pumpkins as well you guys will have to let me know what you think and if it inspires you if you're a quilter or a scrapbook does this make you think of quilting and scrapbooking and be sure to check out the playlist today this is an awesome way to find new creators that maybe you haven't seen before and maybe check out their channel and see what kind of stuff they're doing I can't wait to watch the playlist so thank you so much Heidi for hosting this playlist or this challenge the diy challenge always fun if you enjoyed this video please don't forget to give it a big thumbs up and if you are subscribed to my channel already I just want to let you know how much I appreciate you guys thank you so much for coming back and also if you haven't subscribed maybe you'll consider it and hit the notification bell to find out about any of my new upcoming videos I've got lots planned for fall and Halloween so please stay tuned thanks so much for watching